Even though there are a few weeks of it left on the calendar, summer on the islands ends abruptly with Labor Day. There is no getting around it. The boat schedules change, school starts and the island populations drop by two-thirds or more. Summer houses are quiet and the Islesford Dock Restaurant is closed.
I knew this was coming, actually wished for it openly while riding a crowded mailboat in August, so why this pensive sadness when it all comes to an end?
The first two weeks of September represent a season that is neither summer nor fall in my book. I think the Laplanders have the right idea, identifying eight seasons of the year instead of four—winter, late winter, spring, early summer, summer, late summer, fall, and early winter. (Wouldn’t you think they could come up with names that were a little more dramatic than that?)
If we had eight seasons in the Cranberry Isles, I would call late summer “melancholy.”
It feels like limbo. It is as though I need time to mourn summer before I can move on to fall. I miss the early morning sounds of the song birds; the winter wren, the hermit thrush, the white throated sparrow, the variety of warblers. They are still around, getting ready to head south for the winter, but they aren’t talking about it.
Every year I look back at July and August and think, “But I never got around to”¦ I wish I had”¦ ” It doesn’t seem to matter what I did in those months, I still feel like I might have missed the opportunity to have more fun, needed a little more time for”¦ something.
I can never quite put my finger on what it is. Sure, I wanted the fast pace to slow down a little but I didn’t want to give summer up in one fell swoop. I usually look for quotes or poems to describe the bewildered feeling I always get at this time of year. I want to know someone else understands it and has found a way to put it into words. The anonymous person who first tweeted, “Summer should get a f—ing speeding ticket!” made me laugh in the midst of my where-did-the-summer-go lamentation, but it doesn’t quite capture my August to September funk.
Before I moved to Islesford to live year round in 1976, I was a summer kid. My time on the island was vacation time. I was always sad when I left and I missed the island throughout the year, but I never felt heavy hearted like this. By the time I was back home in Rochester, N.Y. there were plenty of activities connected to school and catching up with my friends to distract me from any post-Maine despondence. It never occurred to me that back on my favorite island there were people who struggled with the transition of a whittled down boat schedule and the departure of friends for the next nine or ten months.
Even after I moved here, I was too busy pinching myself to feel sad when I waved goodbye to people as they left. I couldn’t believe my luck that I was still standing on the dock. I was one of the lucky ones who got to stay behind. I also had a job on a lobster boat, and was too tired at night to notice whether or not the island felt suddenly lonely. It wasn’t until I was married and had stopped working on the boat that I noticed the eerie emptiness that accompanies early September.
As a child, in the off season, I would turn to the book, “Time of Wonder,” by Robert McClosky when I needed an infusion of island summer to allay my longing. The words used by the author to describe how it felt to leave an island at the end of summer were comforting to me. I think they comforted my parents as well because it became our family mantra on the last day of vacation as we packed up to leave and cleaned the house for the next group of relatives to arrive. I still say these words whenever I have been away and am heading back home.
“A little bit sad about the place you are leaving, a little bit glad about the place you are going.”
And what do you know? These are just the words I was looking for to describe my transition from summer to fall. I’m a little bit sad to leave summer behind, but I am really glad that fall is coming right up. It’s one of my favorite times of year.
Barbara Fernald lives on Islesford (Little Cranberry Island).